The Law of Those We Hope For: Abstraction, Infertility, and Obligation In Feminist Jewish Ethics

In her path-breaking study The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity In Jewish Thought, Mara Benjamin offers a trenchant critique of the abstraction built into the core ethical paradigms used by canonical figures in Jewish thought. According to Benjamin, while Jewish thinkers including Emmanuel Levinas, Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig seemed to emphasize “the ethical relation,” they actually fail to describe anything genuinely ethical—instead, they imagine an abstract “Other” who has no distinct features or qualities. Benjamin thus proposes that attending to maternal experience will allow us to remedy this problematic abstraction, and get at a more genuine theorization of our ethical obligations to others.

This paper takes Benjamin's critique of the modern Jewish thought canon as both a starting point and as a provocation—it suggests on the one hand, that Benjamin is right to say that the modern Jewish thought has failed to offer a genuine and useful ethics, in part because it has failed to conceptualize the way different kinds of “ethical relations” might demand different kinds of responses or generate different kinds of obligations. On the other hand, this paper will argue that Benjamin's emphasis on concreteness over abstraction actually limits the full range of maternal experiences she is able to theorize. The paper uses experiences of infertility to show that abstraction, and indeed caring for an “abstract” other, is actually part of many experiences of childbearing and childrearing. 

Building on work from earlier feminist scholarship, Benjamin argues that childbearing and childrearing is characterized by a kind of concreteness. She writes, “Like modern Jewish thinkers before me, I find relationships theologically productive. Interpersonal relationships serve as our primary entry point into the nature of obligation, love, and power. However, my best-known twentieth-century predecessors assumed adult male subjects, imagined relationships in highly stylized terms, and turned even “daily life” or “everydayness” into a philosophical abstraction. Life with children demands a more full-bodied reckoning with relationality” (xv). Like the “command” issued by the face in Levinas, Benjamin that this “more full-bodied reckoning with relationality” takes the form of an obligation or a law. Thus, Benjamin proposes that an infant “promulgates” a “Law of the Baby,” which is characteristically concrete. Benjamin continues, “The law could not be fulfilled in abstract but only in active, embodied, material actions: soothing, feeding, cleaning, comforting, distracting, smiling, and wiping….The Law of the Baby was not the Law of Any Baby but rather the Law of This Baby. This Baby had to be woken up throughout the night to eat because she was born small. This Baby responded with great interest to one particular plush toy…” (8).

In this paper, I argue that many people pursuing fertility treatments engage in a similar form of care, or even respond to a similar form of obligation, but that care or obligation is directed to an entity who is not yet present, and who therefore remains abstract—the hoped-for child. This as yet abstract entity issues particular commands—treatment must be initiated at a specific time, this medication must be injected at a particular time for a particular reason, often to care for a follicle or egg which may or may not mature, which may or may not be fertilized, and which may or may not implant, which may or may grow to term. 

Recognizing the role of abstraction in experiences of infertility has two significant payoffs for feminist theorizations of ethical significance of childbearing. First, it challenges the assumption that parental experience is always associated more with concreteness than with abstraction. Experiences of infertility show that some parental experiences are marked as much by abstract as by the “Law of This Baby.” In doing so, it exposes the way that care for Others who are abstract rather than concrete is actually ubiquitous—abstraction is one tool we can use to think beyond what seems possible from within our specific, limited, concretized bodies. This kind of care can also be found in mourning, in thinking through our aspirations for our living children, and even in imagining how we might reshape our own bodies or identities. To the extent that parenting or caring for young children requires thinking about a child’s future possibilities, it requires a kind of abstraction. Second, recognizing the role of abstraction in experiences of infertility also helps us see the ways that some feminist theorization of childbearing has (perhaps unwittingly) created new philosophical abstractions which exclude key experiences in much the same way that the earlier, misogynistic ones did. The assumption that motherhood is always about concreteness effectively writes out the experiences of those whose children never had the chance to become concrete Babies who could issue their own Laws in the way Benjamin and others imagine. In this way, the paper challenges us to develop new conceptual tools for describing the important conceptual contributions that theorizations of parental experience can make to contemporary ethical discourse.